


Ben Whitesun

by Perspicacia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Cameos by Boba Fett and A'Sharad Hett, F/M, Past Character Death, Various Darklighters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-04-23 16:20:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14336337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perspicacia/pseuds/Perspicacia
Summary: When Obi-Wan brought Luke to the Lars' farm, he found only a struggling grieving widow and not the young, happy couple he hoped. This is how Ben Kenobi became a moisture farmer instead of a hermit...





	Ben Whitesun

**Author's Note:**

> Aeremaee is the best beta in the world and helped me with everything good in this fic!

 

At the end of the story, the brave Knight was rewarded for all his ordeals when he married for true love.

In Obi-wan’s story, that was not exactly what happened. He married for discretion and protection and it was years before love, years before a first kiss.

In Obi-wan’s story, everything started on a sand world, love and despair and betrayal and hope.

Everything started on Tatooine.

 

It was at the end of a hot day that a battered speeder found its way to the Lars farm. Of course every day in that place ran hot, hotter or too hot, so really it was a perfectly normal day and not exactly the stuff of prophecy when a Jedi on the run came with a boy in his arms, a small thing that would one day grow up to change the shape of the galaxy.

 A local observer might have recognized the old thing parking next to the farm as the speeder of old Cot Vre-Cour of Mos Eisley, which he was always trying to sell to unsuspecting off-worlders. In terms of local observers however, there was only Beru Lars, born Beru Whitesun, to carefully observe the stranger in a brown cloak from above the barrel of her rifle.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had tried to contact the Lars homestead exactly once before reaching Tatooine. After all, it had only seemed polite to warn them a little, even if he could not tell them the truth over a public terminal.

Bail Organa had given him enough money to buy a small spaceship—had in fact given him all he could without raising suspicion by shuffling too many accounts around—but Obi-Wan had deemed it more cautious to take the long route, from commercial ship to commercial ship. He was waiting on a small moon for a transport that would bring him only one stop from Tatooine when he tried to raise the Larses, but the terminal affirmed the one he tried to reach had been disconnected. He didn’t insist, fearing it would bring attention. These days, who knew what would?

He wasn’t even sure what he would have said.

“I have here the new-born grandson of your dead step-mother, his father just killed his mother and then I killed him, even after I raised him and loved him too much?”

“Please adopt the baby, he’s named Luke and his father just murdered his mother?”

“Do you remember meeting your step-brother that one time? Well, I bear news, and also this is your nephew, what would you think of raising him?”

No, no, it was better to wait until he could speak to them in person. Luke was the gentlest of babies; he would convince them to keep him just by being himself. Of course perhaps the attachment, and yes, yes, he could admit it, even the love he felt for Luke, was influenced by the fact that every being he had ever loved had been murdered. He needed to love someone or he would go insane very quickly and Luke was there, a luminous little soul only asking to be dry and fed and held.

So Obi-Wan cared for the new-born son of Anakin and Padmé, day after day, ship after ship, while going all the way to Tatooine.

He fed him, bathed him and sang to him, half-forgotten lullabies from his days in the crèche.

Oh Force, the crèche. The _Younglings dead on the floor_ …

Luke.

It was so much easier to concentrate on Luke. Luke was important, Luke was everything. After, when the little boy was safe, then he could let go, then he could go insane first and then rebuild himself, piece by piece, until the time the boy needed him.

Until then… Feed him, sing to him, live only to bring him home.

 

It was almost night when he reached the homestead. He could have spent a night in town after arriving on Tatooine but had decided against it; if he was going to hide on this world he couldn’t afford the risk of people remembering him with a child.

He reached the homestead thinking he would find a family for his very young traveling companion there, but he only found grief and a struggling woman.

Beru had observed him for a few moments, that stranger with sad eyes curved around the child as if to protect it from her rifle and then said: “You can come inside.”

“I would have thought you more careful,” he had answered while obeying.

“Raiders don’t come alone and with a child. And you’re showing obvious signs of dehydration, didn’t you have water?”

“I used it to prepare Luke’s formula. It’s in powder, you need water.”

“Even on this backwater world, we know what that is.”

She had taken charge because at the moment he didn’t seem capable of more than staying seated in her kitchen, drinking very small sips of water from her last working vaporators.

Not his first rodeo with this problem apparently.

She had taken the child to the fresher and disrobed him, discovered he was male and bathed him in some hard-won water, and then came back to the stranger, still seated at her table, eyes glazed over. Once again she took charge and bullied him into the sonics, leaving him some of her father-in-law’s old clothes.

Not her husband’s, even if they would have been of a more appropriate size.

When the man came out he had rolled the legs of the pants and the sleeves of the tunic, and the tunic showed a good part of his chest because Cliegg had been larger. The strange redhead could have seemed a child playing dress-up if not for his gaze, older than the most tired of veterans of Tatooine’s hard life.

She sat down next to him and immediately he held out his arms for the child, cradling him against his chest with tenderness, a finger tracing the little cheek.

“Whose child is that? Should I be worried a whole village is following a child-thief with blasters and fire?” Beru asked, prying open the jug to serve herself a glass of water.

“It’s your nephew. I… When will your husband come home? And Cliegg Lars? I must confess, I don’t think myself capable of explaining it twice.”

“My husband is dead, and so is Cliegg.”

 

The shock was such that Obi-Wan almost tumbled off his chair. Beru took another jug from a close by cupboard and offered him something stronger.

Late in the night Obi-Wan told her everything, and then she told him her story. The Junkland Fever had come and taken not only Cliegg Lars but also his son, Owen, Beru’s husband.

She told him how Owen had cared for his father, until his own fever became too high and he couldn’t anymore, how the neighbours had left gifts of water but had refused to help her bury them, fearing the contagion.

“Pandemics of Junkland Fever are usual on Tatooine, but most of the time only the very old or very young die. People build up an immunity. But this strain was just more dangerous, and Cliegg had lost some of his fire since the death of his wife. And Owen…” She stopped. Owen shouldn’t have died. He was young, and fit, but it hadn’t been enough.

Obi-Wan told her about Anakin, warped by the war until he believed his own lies and justifications to abandon all that had made him a man, leaving only the beast as a reminder of what had been a good man. He told her of the Temple and the children dead on the floor, of the troopers turning against their Generals, executing even the wounded in the Halls of Healing. He told her about Mustafar. He told her about Padmé, about her bright soul, about the miasmas of Dark that had clung to her despite his best efforts. He told her his suspicions that someone, probably Darth Sidious because Anakin had still been too new to the dark for something so complex, had siphoned her life force because with the medical droids and Obi-Wan’s help, she shouldn’t have died. He told her about Padme’s desperate fight to bring Luke to the world when her body was crashing down, destroyed by the Dark Side. He even told her about Leia, something he wasn’t supposed to do, but he kept silent about where she was.

 

The two survivors stayed awake until deep in the night, watching Luke sleep, drinking a strong and almost unpalatable alcohol from the smallest glasses Obi-Wan had ever seen, made from a local succulent plant. There was something almost peaceful about it, two broken souls knowing the other wouldn’t judge. The alcohol tasted foul and burned going down and that too felt cleansing.

“You need to sleep,” Beru had finally decided. “We’ll speak more of this tomorrow.”

In the bed that Shmi and Cliegg had once shared, Obi-Wan slept, the sleep of a weary man knocked out by too much liquor after too many exhausting years and trauma.

And for the first time since Mustafar he didn’t dream of fire, hateful words and yellow eyes, like a presage of happier time to come.

It was the end of a hot day on Tatooine, the moons were travelling the sky, the dunes were singing and people were sleeping and preparing for another day of struggles, and everything was normal except for how a stranger had just brought hope to the planet, in the form of a new-born.

 

When Obi-Wan woke up the next morning, some things had changed in his plans. It was evident Beru was struggling with the farm; small signs of neglect had begun to appear, here and here. He didn’t know the first thing about water farming, but he could feel the place and its hard life in the Force, a feeling of careful mending that only soaked the poorer parts of towns and planets. Owen and Beru were probably working long hours together and she couldn’t do the job of two hard-working people alone.

He used the fresher, the careful grooming of his beard familiar and soothing, his plans lining up in his brain.

He would give her the money Bail had given him. It would probably be enough for her to employ someone, perhaps several someones, for a while. He didn’t need to buy a place, after all. There were hills in the northern part of the desert he’d seen on his map when coming here; he could probably find some sort of cave on the hillside, or carve one if necessary.

He had all the time in the world, now, only to wait and to protect Luke from afar, and to meditate on his failures with Luke’s father.

And Qui-Gon.

Perhaps.

He believed Yoda, he wanted to believe so badly, but it seemed too wonderful. What he wouldn’t give for one of his dead to come back… Yes, he believed Yoda, but he didn’t dare to hope too much.

Hope only existed to be crushed, after all.

Those plans derailed almost immediately. He was still drinking caf and eating flatbread, watching Beru with Luke, when she looked at him explaining his plans and said _no_.

“I will not rob you of your money.”

“Technically, it isn’t really my money. It was gifted to me to care for young Luke. If the money stays with you, it will accomplish its primary objective.”

“Don’t play with words. I can’t imagine someone gifting you so much money to bring me Luke and thinking you could just live in a cave like some sort of wild animal after that.”

She pushed a plate full of some kinds of small fruit to him and looked fixedly until he took a few. She had a gaze that would have made Jedi Healers envious and he very carefully kept back the comments about cave dweller civilizations that had come to his lips.

“My sister is always insisting that if I don’t want to sell the farm and move to work in her hotel in Anchorhead, I should hire help.”

“And the money would help you with that.”

“I should hire help,” she repeated, accentuating the words as if he should understand more than he was and suddenly a spark ignited in his brain and he said, in perhaps not his most brilliant retort: “Oh. _OH_.”

 

And that is how Ben Kenobi was hired on at a moisture farm on Tatooine.

 

*****

The rumour spread throughout the desert quickly: a spacer had brought Beru her orphan nephew and she had kept the baby, and the spacer too, and was now teaching him water farming.

And with the rumour came the first questions.

Beru wasn’t the sort to shy from difficult explanations and was of the opinion that if you acted like something was normal with enough composure, people would begin to believe it.

Even when the normal was the sudden addition of a new worker who was totally unknown to anyone on the planet, and the nephew of her dead husband that said worker had brought to Beru as a last wish of Owen’s also recently deceased step-brother.

Even when the curiosity Beru was trying to fend off was her sister’s!

“That’s a lot of changes,” Dama remarked immediately, something like twenty seconds after sitting down with a tall glass of water in the kitchen. Outside, they heard the rhythmic noises made by Ben trying to convince the closest vaporators to work again. Luke was sleeping in the bassinet, just to the right of Beru’s elbow, and they were preparing pickled mushrooms. A baby needed a lot of things, things Beru couldn’t find easily, and her sister had agreed to buy them for her in Anchorhead and bring them but Beru had known it would come with questions.

“A baby, a new hire…”

“You were always trying to convince me to accept money from you to hire someone.”

“Because I thought you didn’t have it! Why did you wait so long to hire help; were you waiting for everything to degrade more?”

“Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the farm. Not… not without Owen.”

“Oh Beru…”

The newly made Aunt looked away, an intense feeling of shame burning in her throat. She was using her husband’s death to escape questions… Her gaze fell on the crib and the shame retreated a little.

For Luke.

Owen adored kids, for Luke he would have understood.

“Is it wise to choose a stranger like that? The Darklighters could certainly have recommended someone.”

“Huff Darklighter already offered to buy the farm. Said it was what Owen would have wanted, for me to be safe with you, working in your hotel. If he was so preoccupied with what Owen would have wanted, he would have come to help when… when my husband was sick. No, I can handle hiring someone without the Darklighters’ help.”

“But does he really need to be a stranger? I know you can defend yourself but alone with that strange man…”

Beru smiled a sad smile and didn’t answer, and Ben Kenobi stayed.

He was the friend who had brought Beru her freshly orphaned nephew, he was her employee, and soon he became a familiar face in town.

It was easy to live with him. He took so little space sometimes she could have thought she was alone with Luke and he was only a ghost. A ghost who worked the machines and cleaned up the kitchen every day to thank for the food, sure, but still a ghost, nothing more than a brown silhouette at the edge of her vision.

And when night came he was a lonely man roaming the desert, meditating on dunes, searching the Force for answers; he was the man whose nightmares sometimes shook everything in the house and whose wary eyes contained old shadows.

“Perhaps it would help if you talk to someone?” Beru suggested one day, when he was, for the third time this month, putting back together a chair which had shattered under the pressure of his mind. “I think you’re getting worse.”

It was true: after a first period when the bags under his eyes had become lighter, he was sleeping so little now that she was sure some days he didn’t even try, just roamed the desert like a lost spirit.

“If you fear for Luke and you, I can…”

“No. Whatever you’re going to say, no. I don’t understand the Force but I know you would be dead before hurting the two of us. But I fear someone will sense it or that you’ll get so exhausted that one day you’ll lapse in town.”

He stayed silent for a few minutes, his hands working on the wood. He had a way of tinkering she had never seen before and that consisted for the most part, from what she could see, out of asking the chair what shape it should have.

Finally he said, his head low and his voice defeated: “I can’t exactly hope to talk about it with a healer when the bounty for Jedi is so high. Not that I don’t think the healers here don’t have ethics, but the temptation alone…”

“Perhaps you could talk to me?”

“I wouldn’t impose…”

“Ben, you’re getting worse. I’m pretty sure you’ve lost weight.”

He wouldn’t look her in the eyes, which probably meant she was right.

The next night she left the door to her bedroom open, and when she heard his step in the hallway she joined him in the kitchen before he could step outside. He didn’t talk about Anakin, never would in all their years together, not after that first time when he had found only a grieving widow instead of the young couple he had waited for, but they prepared bread for the next day together, working in silence, then tinkered with the motor of the old speeder in the garage.  

Night after night she woke up for him and they worked together silently, repairing, preparing, seasoning… With the work of the day outside and the work of the sleepless nights inside, soon the farm was in better shape that it had been all its life, the machines running, the storerooms full of jars of pickled food. And even nightmares must recede before exhaustion. Some nights, Ben stayed in bed.

 

Soon, the idea that Ben and Beru were more than working together started doing the rounds. Strangely, it started because Ben Kenobi was too pretty. Not in the bejewelled, perfumed courtesan way, no, he was built too strongly for that, with callused hands and haunted eyes. And he had his faults. When he was a little lost with the habits of normal, non-mystical-warrior-monks people, Ben had the tendency to get polysyllabic in the worst way. Of course the average Tatooine farmer was equally lost when his interlocutor tossed words around like he was running for most obnoxious politician, but farmers were of the opinion that everybody had his little quirks and people working hard and sometimes paying a round in the cantina were always normal enough.

However, he was strangely graceful, like an exotic dancer would be—or a warrior of a mystical order, as the case may be—a red head with fair skin on a world where that was extinguished from the human population simply by way of too much sun and skin cancers generation after generation. He was too pretty for Tatooine and even staying away from town for weeks at a time like he sometimes did, someone would one day notice it.

And someone did, someone saw him and desired him, tried to go from neighbour to potential lover. It was a disaster waiting to happen when two nights a week, Ben’s nightmares still broke objects and sometimes, the harder nights, coloured other people’s dreams in fire. Beru’s efforts to defuse the situation—because Ben was terribly useless in this—resulted in the misunderstanding that Beru was jealous.

“It’s perhaps easier if people believe it,” she only had said.

“It will stop you from finding a new husband,” Obi-Wan had remarked.

“With Luke, I lead a dangerous life. I would never put someone at risk of being murdered simply for marrying me. It’s better like this, it gives me an excuse to stop other men interested in the farm from pursuing me.”

“Beru?”

“Hmm?”

“A man who would only pursue you for the farm would deserve my lightsaber in the a-”

“Ben!”

 

Eight months after the beginning of their cohabitation, while Beru was drinking her caf like her life depended on it, she connected the terminal for a little time with the holonews. She needed to stay seated for the time it took for the caffeine to kick in anyway.

What she saw made her drop her mug and the sound of the shattering faience against the floor tiles made Ben run into the kitchen in only his leggings, his torso glistening from the cleaning oil.

Darth Vader, in all his armoured glory, was on the screen, the message at the bottom of the screen proclaiming his status of second in command of the Empire. Ben swore viciously and sat down heavily on the bench.

“We need to hide you better,” Bery whispered, fear in her voice.

She hadn’t realized before how attached she had gotten to the man. His building friendship and Luke’s sunny, tooth-less smile had filled a painful, Owen-shaped void in her life.

She missed her husband but not with the same sharpness of before, when she had sometimes thought to drink to numb the pain. She missed her husband, she always would, but she was building her life back up, and that life contained a strange exile and an adorable baby and the suns would run out of fire before she let someone take them away without trying to protect them.

Even armoured, murderous Sith.

And that is how Ben Kenobi and Luke Skywalker became Ben and Luke Whitesun. Since she brought the farm into the marriage and Ben had officially come to her with only the clothes on his back, people weren’t surprised to see Ben take her name. They weren’t exactly surprised about the wedding either; Tatooine was a harsh word and you took your happiness where you could. If two adults living together had fallen into bed and wanted to make it official… Well, it was normal.

They commed their neighbours and Beru’s family, chose a date and insisted they didn’t want a big party. There would be a lunch at Dama’s hotel in Anchorhead and that would be enough. Beru refused to buy a new wedding dress and decided her nicest tunic would do. Ben couldn’t exactly marry in his Jedi clothes. Technically, he could, but it would be like spitting in the face of the Code: even if he and Beru didn’t share the usual husband and wife relationship, he didn’t kid himself by pretending he wasn’t attached to her and little Luke and it would just add insult to injury.

He couldn’t marry in Owen’s clothes—which he had started to wear because they were the right size and you didn’t waste good clothes on Tatooine—so the night before, Beru helped him tailor Cliegg’s.

It was a simple ceremony, so different from her first wedding, and of course Ben had needed to use the Force on the officiator, since Luke and he had no imperial identity cards, but at the end of the day, Beru was officially a mother and a wife and had the paperwork to prove it. 

And life passed in their strange family unit. Things weren’t perfect. Ben cried and disappeared for three days when Luke called him ‘Da’ for the first time, and Beru never lost the habit of leaving the door to her room open, but the nights where she heard Ben and followed him to the kitchen or the garage were less and less.

 Life passed, rhythmed by Luke growing up, strong and loved.

 

He was two years old when Boba Fett found them. Young Boba, with his eyes so dark and his pain so vast. He was already so dangerous at that young age that Beru lost a finger and Ben didn’t hear anything out of his left ear for a few months, relying on the Force until she convinced him to have his eardrum reconstructed, even if it wasn’t exactly cheap.

 

It happened like this: Fett, still learning his trade, simply asked for the exact location of his bounty and raised a red flag in Anchorhead.

“Someone is looking for your brother-in-law. Some sort of mercenary in armour,” a bartender from _The dancing Twi'lek_ said to Dama one day, when he delivered beer to the hotel. He wouldn’t have run into the desert to help, life wasn’t that kind on Tatooine, but Beru and Ben were locals and the stranger was… well, a stranger. The bartender had taken his money and given him directions to the farm, but now he was raising the alarm and would have probably helped bury the body and only asked for a small fee in return for his silence. Dama thanked him, tipped him very well and then called her sister. 

 Beru and Ben were still bickering about whether Beru should or should not be with Luke in the fortified, hidden room they had spent the years crafting just in case when Fett had sprung up from the desert.

They now had the teenager sitting at their table, cuffed and cursing, and Ben couldn’t look him in the eyes.

When she asked him, their voices low on the other side of the room, he just answered: “He looks so much like…”

“Like your men?”

He nodded, grim-faced, and she didn’t press. Sometimes he talked a little about before. Never about Anakin of course, but sometimes about a clone named Cody, about a childhood friend named Bant… Yes, Boba Fett was like the ghost of years past for Ben Whitesun, the ghost of men loved and manipulated by the Sith, the ghost of his people’s murders… He took a firm breath and looked at her.

“So, what do we do now? Can you?.. you know.” She made a theatrical move with her hand.

He grimaced again.

“It only works on weak-minded people.” They looked again at the young man and they made a face in tandem. Whatever epithet you called Boba Fett, weak-minded wasn’t on the list and never would be.

“We can’t…” Beru stopped. She couldn’t even say it. She had killed Tuskens, once, when she was only seventeen and a raiding party had attacked his cousin’s farm where she was spending a few days there, but it was in self-defence, in battle! They couldn’t murder a teenager in cold blood and bury him in the dunes!

“I need to call a few people,” Ben whispered.

“Do that many know you’re here?”

“I need to call one person,” he amended. “Perhaps he can find me a cell.”

Beru left him to his calls, not exactly convinced—because what could the burgeoning Rebellion do; toss that poor, murderous orphan in a cell and ditch the key for the next eighty years?—and went to fetch Luke.

Boba left their story between two clones-turned-rebels, probably the only people with a chance of containing him, and Obi-Wan got drunk like she had never imagined he could that night.

 

Luke was four years old when the Tuskens started to reclaim old lands again. It was an old battle, which farmers and Tuskens had played at for centuries, since the beginning of human settlements. The two parties were paying for it in blood in every generation but never gained a real, durable advantage against the other. This time, however, the Tuskens did it united. Farm after farm they progressed and at every report they heard, Ben’s lips pinched tighter.

“Huff Darklighter is speaking of some sort of militia again,” Beru remarked when she came back from their neighbours, where she and the other women had helped Lanal Darklighter birth a daughter.

“I don’t think it will work. People are still reeling from that Orrin Gault’s false alliance of settlers.”

“Oh, his idea was good. It was the lying and manipulating and pretending to be Tuskens to force farmers to join his cause that was the problem.”

Until the day they came to the farm.

Beru was sleeping peacefully when Ben entered her room, put a hand over her mouth and said urgently:  

“Take Luke and your best blaster. Lock the both of you in the secure room.”

She had taken Luke, terrified less by his Aunt’s expression than by what he was feeling in that way Ben and him had, stashed him into the safe room, and had run to help Ben.

He hadn’t needed her. He had taken that strange weapon she pretended to know nothing about from the chest in his room and, in front of the entire Tusken army, he was fighting a Tusken armed in the same way. It was terrifying, even for a woman who had seen her first Krayt Dragon when she was seven years old.

“Who was that man?” she asked later. “The one dressed like a Tusken raider but armed like you.”

“A lost soul.”

“Don't give me that cryptic bantha shit.”

“Beru!”

“Will he come back? Should I send Luke to my sister for a few days?”

“I will never see him again,” Ben said, sure like the Force had told him, “and he will never set foot on this planet again.”

 

Then Beru took ill. One day, waking up, she felt the first signs of a fever and thought she had caught a cold. Ben and her had spent one hour every night over the last week teaching Luke the stars, the three of them flat on their backs on the domo covering the compound.

Only it wasn’t a cold. By the next day she was too weak to stand up, and Ben asked for permission to use the Force on her.

He went pale the second his hand touched her forehead, then bundled Luke into their speeder and brought him to Anchorhead, to Beru’s sister.

From her illness she would never remember everything.

She remembered her fear when she understood it was the illness that had taken Owen from her, and the fight she had fought, and Ben’s voice in her hear, his hand against her cheek, the water he gave her…

She had too much to live for, Luke, beautiful Luke, her son in every way but in blood.

And Ben.

Ben, who stayed with her every minute of her illness and who had, she would always be sure of it, cheated with the Force to save her even if he had always said that using it was dangerous, that it could be sensed.

When Ben brought Luke back from Anchorhead they had a small party, just the three of them. At five years old, Luke understood enough to know he could have lost his aunt. They drank sugary juices and ate cakes and Ben sang old songs from planets Beru couldn’t even name and it went late in the night, probably too late for Luke who would be cranky the next day if he couldn’t sleep until noon.

The next morning it rained at dawn when Ben went outside to work on their old speeder. It was the first time since he had come to this planet five years ago. He had seen mist sometimes in the mornings just before the first sun came out over the horizon during the cold season, but this time it was really rain, a torrential rain, fat drops impacting the sand, the dome of the homestead, the paving of the courtyard, washing everything away, past sins and encrusted dust alike. He could feel in the Force the life suddenly blossoming in the desert, billions of seeds that had waited years for this moment and where now saturating themselves with water, germinating quickly to accomplish their cycles before the water was evaporated. In his bones, he knew that the desert would be covered in flowers for the next few weeks and he was feeling drunk with the Living Force.

When Beru ventured outside it felt like the most natural thing in the world to come together, right under the rain.

He thought that when the day came, if it came, nerves would stiffen his muscles, anxiety would paralyze his hands. He imagined Beru taking charge and leading him into her bedchamber, he imagined there would be alcohol, he imagined the lights would be out.

He certainly didn’t imagine their first time together would be in the rain in the courtyard, against the smooth surface of the new coating he had applied one month ago, kissing as if they would have died without it, clothes only discarded a minimum.

She let out a gentle sound when it was finished and he took that sound and kept it hidden in his soul.

Then Beru looked over his shoulder and nudged him with a sharp elbow.

“ _Ben!_ ”

“Oh, sorry, my dear.”

He made a gesture and all the floating tools and the speeder touched down delicately.

They didn’t need more words. Two weeks later, Ben tore down the wall between their bedrooms to make a bigger one.

 

Time passed them by. Time and years and soon Luke wasn’t the sweet child that Obi-Wan had cared for all the way to Tatooine anymore, or the toddler that had nodded off in Beru’s arms but a wonderful teenage boy every day… and also a royal headache most of them.

Luke always wanted to do good and young Biggs Darklighter, his usual partner in crime, always had good intentions too, but Ben had needed to mind-whammy half the population fifty kilometres around to make them forget either Luke’s crusade against Jabba’s men or Ben’s subsequent rescues.

How many mornings had Ben abandoned what he was doing to run to his side, the Force urging the poor surrogate father on, putting wings on his heels?

The exile could only be happy for the blindness of teenagers about their parents or guardians because he couldn’t make Luke forget the same way he did other people. He wasn’t the most in touch with his feelings, meditation or not, and was aware Beru did the majority of the emotional work in their relationship, but the level of blindness Luke was showing was sometimes worrisome. Did Luke think all parents were always at the right place at the right time that way?

That morning Ben sat down on a boulder, out of breath, watching the landscape. He had left the farm an hour ago, grumbling all the way to the cliffs because the Force had warned him he needed to be there that morning. When the speeder appeared below him he jumped, using the Force to augment his vault. He was supposed to be in town picking up supplies, not jumping into an out of control speeder piloted by two idiotic and drunk teenagers, in the middle of nowhere.

The edge of the cliff raced closer, closer, still closer, and it was in fact so close that he instinctively used the Force more than the brakes of the speeder. He took control of the mass of the speeder and made it take a curve that it definitely shouldn’t have been able to handle.

The thing finally stopped, all sort of rivets groaning, and he took a second to breathe so he wouldn’t yell before turning to Luke and Biggs.

“You’re grounded until the next millennium,” he carefully enounced.

He took back the miscreants to the farm by the scruff of their neck before calling the Darklighters to come take Biggs home, and then finally went to town for his supplies.

All day long something was on his mind and he never really succeeded in putting his finger on it. He did his work, his mind only half on it and it only resolved itself in the evening.  He had joined Beru outside on the bench he had installed for them to watch the suns setting.

The two of them sat down side-by-side on the bench, their hands entwined. The sunsets were particularly beautiful that night and they ate salted grains and even had a small glass of plum wine, silent and comfortable together.

And looking at the night coming Obi-Wan suddenly realized, and it was quite a shock, that he was happy.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Dama Whitesun Brunk is Beru sister, found in the novel Tatooine Ghost .


End file.
